Arundel is a town of older owner-occupiers with money in the walls and time on their hands. About seven in ten homes are owned outright or on a mortgage. The median resident is fifty-four. The typical household brings in around £58,000 a year on total income. A quarter of homes are single-pensioner households. It is not a young town, and it is not a struggling one, but it is not the professional-commuter belt either.
Tenure is where the picture starts, and it is heavily owner-occupied. About seven in ten homes are owned, either outright or with a mortgage still running. Roughly one in five homes is privately rented. Just over one in ten homes sits in the social rented sector, which for a market town of this scale is a reasonable share and not an insignificant one. The pooled rental share, private and social together, sits at around three in ten, which is close to what you would expect for a small West Sussex town that has kept some of its older housing in social use and rented the rest to a mix of professionals, families and downsizers who have not yet bought back in. This is not a town owned by landlords, and it is not a town owned by short-let investors. It is a town owned by the people who live in it.
Age tells the story that tenure hints at. The median resident is fifty-four, which is well above the national picture and tells you what the population pyramid looks like without needing to draw it. The working-age band between twenty-five and forty-four, the group that usually carries the demographic weight of a town, sits at only about eighteen per cent of residents. That is a low share, and it is the reason the schools are small, the buses are thin, and the working-from-home number is high. The other end of the pyramid is where the numbers cluster: the town skews older, considerably older than the national average, with a lot of retirees, semi-retirees, and downsizers who arrived from somewhere bigger with the equity to make Arundel work.
Household income is comfortable rather than exceptional. The typical household brings in around £58,000 a year on total income before tax. That is a mid-to-upper number for a small English market town, and it reflects the mix of retired homeowners with pension income, self-employed professionals working from home, and dual-earner households where both incomes contribute. It is not a wealthy-suburb number and it is not a rural-poverty number. It is the kind of income that supports a comfortable life inside a working local economy, with enough left over for the landscape and the heritage to be reasons to be here rather than costs to be resented.
Household make-up leans small and older. About thirty-eight per cent of households are single-person households, which is a high share and mostly reflects the pensioner-single number: about twenty-four per cent of all households are single pensioners living alone. Couples with dependent children make up close to thirteen per cent of households, which is a modest share for a town of this size. Lone-parent households sit at around seven or eight per cent. Overcrowding is essentially absent at under two per cent, which is what happens when the housing stock is old, the rooms are generous, and the household sizes are small. It is a town of individual older people, retired couples, and a smaller layer of working families sitting on top.
The verdict on who lives here is 3 out of 5. Not a young town, not a poor one, not a rich one, and not a mixed working-professional town. It is a town of older owner-occupiers with steady incomes, a smaller working-family layer, and a rented sector that is smaller than the national picture but not invisible. If you are one of the people described above, you fit. If you are not, you will notice.